Pink and White over Red | Anderson Collection at Stanford University

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© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduction, including downloading of ARS member works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Pink and White over Red

An exemplary work of color field painting, Pink and White over Red is a simple, almost geometric painting. The top third is a white rectangle and the bottom two-thirds is a red rectangle with a pink border between them and surrounding both. In nineteen fifty-seven, Mark Rothko painted Pink and White over Red with oil on canvas measuring just over nine-and-a-half feet wide by just under nine feet high.

The white rectangle has a rough perimeter with the irregular fuzzy edges fading into the dull pink border. Inside the rectangle the color is smudgy and varied from white to off-white beige, giving it an organic look.

Separated by several inches of pink, the red rectangle is an earthy orange-red. Like the white rectangle, the color has variation, around the upper left, it looks a little paler, towards the bottom it gets darker. The edge of the red is also fuzzy but looks generally smoother than the white along the top and sides, but at the bottom the paint application looks a little wetter as there are areas near the sides where paint drips and dribbles are visible.

The pink border also has slight variations in tone: sometimes slightly brighter, sometimes darker. Around the white field, the border is several inches, though around the red, it is only a few inches.

His vast canvases engulf the viewer, inviting contemplation. A leading practitioner of Color Field painting, Rothko arrived at his signature format, represented here by Pink and White over Red, by the late 1940s. Rectangular fields of white and red hover weightlessly over the surface of the canvas. In contrast to many of his peers—like Jackson Pollock, who poured pre-mixed paint directly onto the canvas—Rothko achieved his luminous, shifting swaths of color by adeptly layering thin washes of paint.

On loan to Foundation Louis Vuitton for the exhibition Mark Rothko.